And then there was what he actually said. Babbling incontinently about having ‘vision’ and being ‘radical’ and ‘progressive’ and how ‘my generation will not throw away the privilege of government’ in order to bring about this radical and progressive change for Britain – a fruity way, surely, of trying to justify his patent cowardice in not resigning to help force Gordon Brown out -- it was the example of radicalism that he came up with which was so astounding. Referring to an article he wrote last year in which he had written that ‘a radical new phase was needed in Labour policy’, he then actually claimed that the government’s part take-over of Lloyds Bank was an example of that radicalism: If I had come on this programme last August and said ‘The best example of a radical new phase is for the Labour Government to own two thirds of Lloyds Bank, that’s real radicalism’ you’d have said ‘you must be absolutely barking’... But as Naughtie rightly spluttered the government had only done that because it was forced into it by the economic crisis. To claim it was its ‘choice’ was absurd. Yet Miliband said: No no no, I’m sorry, it’s absurd to say that the government did not choose to own two-thirds of Lloyds Bank. What Naughtie had obviously meant – as he emphasised -- was that it was a choice that had been forced onto the government. It was hardly as if Gordon Brown had woken up one morning and out of a clear blue sky had had the radical (?) idea that he would take over the banks. It was only a ‘choice’ in the circumstances of an excruciating crisis – of which he himself had been in part the architect. Yet Miliband was claiming that this was an excitingly radical policy, an example of what he then called ‘our job to make the unconventional conventional’, as if it was part of the party programme. If a lesser mortal had had such an exchange, one might have concluded that he was either stupid or dishonest. But with Miliband it’s surely worse – a frightening level of delusion that derives from a mind that is so hermetically sealed by the force of ideology that he simply inhabits an intellectual, political and moral sphere in which the normal rules of reason just don’t apply. And yet he was (and maybe still thinks of himself as) the supposedly most favoured challenger to G Brown. No wonder the Labour party voted last night to die.
If This Is A Leadership Contender, I'm A Banana
My jaw is still in the floor after this morning’s performance on the Today programme (0810) by the Foreign Secretary David Miliband. First of all he gabbled away with statements he had clearly come on to make and which turned the interview largely into a campaigning platform (for what end? And against whom?) yet protested that he would ‘battle through the rest of this interview’ to make his points. Eh? He barely allowed interviewer Jim Naughtie a word in edgways.
Tuesday, 9 June 2009
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